Understanding The Magnificent Seven

My talk begins at 0:36.

The app is hosted here, the code is here, and a blog post discussing the project in further detail is here.

Interactive dashboard in R/Shiny examining the “Magnificent Seven” stocks while comparing their performance to the S&P 500. While avoiding giving investing advice, I illustrate the Seven’s outsize share of the S&P’s total market cap, suggesting that these companies’ performances (boosted by Covid-19 and the craze for AI) are inflating the S&P’s overall performance.

In the app, you can customize several visualizations of the Mag7 stocks and their performance compared to the S&P.

Monthly averaged price data from 2015 to 2024.

Percent change in META price compared to the S&P 500 from 2022 to present. Both values were negative until early 2024.

At year end of 2023, the Seven accounted for a quarter of the S&P 500’s $47.7 trillion market cap.

Bar chart of S&P 500’s market cap from year-end 2014. The considerable contraction in 2022 is part of a larger stock market decline in 2022 due to the aftermath of Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.